Legacy builder

The award-winning social entrepreneur tells Saba Salman how experiencing racism as an immigrant in the 1960s influenced her vision to create a community centre that has drawn comparisons with the Eden Project

Rita Patel does not shake hands with anybody - not even Nelson Mandela. In 25 years, the veteran community campaigner and social entrepreneur has refused handshakes with not only Mandela, but also Bill Clinton and Prince Charles. She rejects the custom not because of an aversion to the person she is greeting, but a desire to form connections. So she hugs instead.

Unorthodox as Patel's approach is, the philosophy behind it - a desire to break down barriers - has driven her work in Leicester for more than two decades, culminating last year with the founding of the Peepul Centre, a community centre that has drawn comparisons with the Eden Project as a monument to the millennium.

Last week, she won the Beacon prize for England, awarded by charitable trust the Beacon Fellowship to those who have made exceptional contributions to society. Beacon chairman Martyn Lewis describes 47-year-old Patel as a model to others challenging exclusion and prejudice, a "tenacious and determined" community leader.

Patel certainly has an infectious presence. She captivates you with impassioned mantras - such as "all of us, even our enemies, are capable of great things" - and punctuates this idealistic vision with the aggressive and blunt language of an activist. But having come up from a grassroots voluntary organisation - she helped to set up the Belgrave Baheno project for young Asian women in the late 1970s - there is substance to her style. She has, as she says, "walked the talk".

The Peepul Centre, named after a tree revered by Hindus and Buddhists as holy, is a new community centre for the Belgrave area of Leicester. But to call it a community centre is a bit like describing the Eden Project as a conservatory in Cornwall. At the heart of the £20m, three-storey building, designed by architects Andrzej Blonski, is a huge central foyer and spiral staircase. The space is an arts venue offering educational and training resources alongside health and leisure facilities. There is a 350-seat auditorium, a restaurant, cafe, nursery, complementary therapy and treatment wing, two gyms - one for women only - and a fitness suite for older people.

The project is also a social enterprise. Money raised by theatre tickets or fitness classes is ploughed back into services, thus breaking the begging bowl cycle of grant-based funding. Funders include the Millennium Commission, which provided £7.8m, the East Midlands Development Agency, the Arts Council and Big Lottery Fund. Leicester city council contributed £260,000.

Patel envisaged a self-sufficient neighbourhood centre created by the community for the community. It took a decade to plan and fund, and opened last year. In a city that ranks 32nd out of the 354 most deprived districts in England, and where some 30% of the population is Asian, it is a successful symbol of community regeneration, as well as of multiculturalism.

The centre's ethos is about uniting communities. Nodding towards two white pensioners who have just walked into the venue for a fitness class, Patel says: "They don't think: 'We're white people using a black centre.' They're just using their local centre. If people see the things here that matter to them, they will make use of the Peepul Centre."

She views the current debate on cohesion and integration as divisive. "Using terms such as 'community cohesion' focuses attention on what the black community should do to fit in, rather than what can be done to educate or boost employment," she argues. "These terms have been a process of disempowerment for black and white communities because they set them apart."

The trend towards the "soft language" of cohesion is a source of irritation. "There are some hard issues about bigotry, hatred, fear and discrimination and at least in the 80s and 90s we were big enough to admit that racism and sex discrimination was rife, and people would talk about it in direct ways. The inclusion agenda has sought to gentrify and move away from all these kinds of uncomfortable areas."

Patel says she experienced racism when she emigrated from India with her family in the 1960s. She was chastised as a child by teachers in the playground for talking to a fellow pupil in Gujarati, even though she spoke no English, and saw her father in tears at the discrimination he suffered. A school vice-principal in India, he redid his teacher training in Leicester, but schools did not want to employ an Asian teacher and the only work he could get was in a factory. Patel's parents influenced her desire to work in the community. Her father, for example, helped Asian neighbours with advice on filling out forms.

Having experienced racism first-hand, Patel is sceptical about the purpose of the government's commission on integration and cohesion. "You cannot have a commission on cohesion and integration and expect something concrete to come out of it," she says. "You want to build a more cohesive society that is based on trust and people feeling they have a stake in society. Can a commission come up with something that will make people trust each other? No. Can a government come up with legislation that can do this? No."

She is also irked by the debate about the radicalisation of young British Muslims, which she believes apportions blame on the ethnic community for not reining in its younger, disaffected members. "People in the Muslim community are as much concerned about radicalisation of their youngsters as the government. Those young people are doing what they're doing for a reason, their experience has led them to it. Pointing a finger with anger is only reciprocating the anger. You need to understand what social and economic circumstances are making them angry."

Patel worries that politicians' demands for "quick fixes" drive initiatives such as the commission or clamping down on immigration. But surely vote-chasing MPs are unlikely to glance beyond the next election with the long-sighted determination natural to campaigners such as Patel? She disagrees, arguing that the state could do more to encourage developers to build new hospitals or schools that include spaces for community use, or tackle the fact that minorities are excluded from consultation for regeneration schemes because planners fail to provide multi-lingual material. More funding for youth and community workers based within local neighbourhoods, she says, would help build links with "a generation that's growing up disconnected".

Opportunities to inspire

Ultimately, says Patel, the secret to uniting communities is simple: the government must truly listen to what people want rather than tell them what it thinks they need. "Tony Blair needs to realise it is about empowering people and creating opportunities to inspire that will bring about the kind of society that we want." Patel laughs at the shameless plug, but says that a network of community-run Peepul Centres would do more to bind neighbourhoods than current government policies ever could. Patel and her team have succeeded in bringing together a diverse population under one roof, she believes, simply because they have spent years listening to its needs so are certain of what services it requires.

It was this that partly led sports minister Richard Caborn, chairman of the Millennium Commission, to praise the Peepul Centre for being "more than a building" and liken it to the Eden Project. Patel agrees that there are similarities. Both are simple ideas with huge potential, she says, and, like Eden, Patel and her team refused to let go of their vision in the face of adversity - problems with funding, for example. She adds: "Behind the Eden Project is the idea of leaving a legacy for future generations. That is the kind of impact we want to have, and this centre is a starting point."